Save Access

from: Catholic News Service

Two FCC commissioners outline principles for an improved media system

By Mark Pattison
Catholic News Service

MEMPHIS, Tenn. (CNS) -- Media concentration is something that should be stopped, Federal Communications Commissioner Michael Copps told a Jan. 13 audience at the National Conference for Media Reform in Memphis.

FCC attempts to permit greater media consolidation earlier in the decade were thwarted, but if concentration efforts pass congressional and judicial muster next time, "you'll see a great wave of consolidation, bigger than the one before (permitted by the 1996 Telecommunications Act), and if that happens, you'll never get that genie back in the bottle," said Copps, a Catholic.

Fellow FCC commissioner Jonathan Adelstein said the FCC chairman "has enormous power. His greatest power is in scheduling" what the commission will take up and when, and with new FCC chairman Kevin Martin, he said, "we don't know what he plans to do."

Adelstein added, "If we do our work properly, we won't have a bad rule" on media deregulation. Adelstein and Copps are the two Democrats on the five-member FCC.

Over the past quarter-century, the FCC, with Congress' approval, has steadily increased the number of TV and radio stations that can be owned by a single entity in one market. While in the 1970s the FCC mandated an end to television and newspaper cross-ownership in the same city by one firm, it has allowed cross-ownership in the telephone and cable-TV fields.

Noting that only about 3 percent of all broadcast properties are owned by women and another 3 percent are owned by members of racial or ethnic minorities, Adelstein said, "No matter which rule you look at ... consolidation further undercuts minority ownership," as raising sufficient funds to buy media outlets in a seller's market becomes a burden difficult to overcome. The number of media properties owned by minorities has shrunk by 30 percent since the 1996 telecommunications law was enacted.

"It's gotten so bad (at the FCC) to get action fast with this, we now are going around like this as a bully pulpit," Copps said of the trip to Memphis.

During the conference, at a separate forum Jan. 12, Copps unveiled what he called the "American Media Contract." The five-point plan listed rights each American should come to expect from their media: "a right to media that strengthens our democracy; a right to local stations that are actually local; a right to media that looks and sounds like America; a right to news that isn't canned and radio playlists that aren't for sale; a right to programming that isn't so damned bad so damned often."

Also at the Jan. 12 forum, Adelstein said any further FCC efforts at media concentration should be buried "6 feet deep" -- if not by the FCC itself, then by Congress.

In his remarks to the Jan. 13 audience, Copps said the FCC was right to approve "video franchise" regulations that allow telephone companies to offer cable services. "The cable companies need competition," Copps added.

Concerns were raised at other times during the conference as to whether states would act in their citizens' best interests. Cable franchises are required by the municipality that grants the franchise to make service available to all areas, while some states' statewide video franchise bills permit telephone companies to avoid "high cost" areas like rural universal service, leading to charges the phone companies would be targeting only the richest potential customers.

On the subject of children's television, Adelstein said he does not see "how interactive advertising" exploiting children "would ever be acceptable." He was referring to the online use of familiar children's series characters to tout products in a future when television and computers are more closely integrated. Adelstein quoted Haim Saban, who made a fortune with "Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers," as saying that children "don't have the ability to distinguish between programming and advertising."

Copps also criticized the slow rate at which the United States is gearing up to operate in a wireless environment.

"We are the only industrialized country on God's green earth that does not have a strategy for getting (Internet) broadband out to its people," he said. "In broadband penetration, we're No. 21 ... right after Estonia and tied with Slovenia."